Barbara Kruger’s bold Untitled (Our prices are insane!), is emblematic of the artist’s signature, eye-catching style: bordered in fire engine red, the appropriated, black-and-white face of a 1940s horror film star stares out at the viewer. Kruger’s text, in the frantic cadence of advertising copy, runs at the same diagonal as the fake blood streaked across the figure’s face: Our prices are insane!

 

The present work was executed in 1987, alongside some of the artist’s most iconic works in public collections—including Untitled (I shop therefore I am), Pinault Collection, and Untitled (We don’t need another hero), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Untitled (Our prices are insane!) brings together the conceptual artist’s strong sense of graphic design, ad-speak, and visual juxtaposition in a witty commentary on communication and art in the late 1980s.

 

Kruger’s fine art practice grew out of her career as a graphic designer at Condé Nast Publications, where she learned the effects that different combinations of images and typefaces could have on a reader. Her time in commercial graphic design was “the biggest influence on my work,” she recalled, as her waged work “became, with a few adjustments, my ‘work’ as an artist.”ⁱ Indeed, Kruger’s keen editorial eye shines through in Untitled (Our prices are insane!); her selected horror film still strikes a perfect emotional chord—the face is terrified, yet not too terrifying to look at, and the actor’s wide eyes draw the viewer into the work. Kruger’s thoughtful placement of the text across the actor’s cheek and nose keeps the most arresting features—the eyes, open mouth, and blood-stained cheek—visible, for heightened visual effect. Even the slant of the text is carefully keyed to the drip of the fake blood; these aesthetic choices mark out Untitled (Our prices are insane!) as a true masterclass in graphic design, and a masterpiece of Kruger’s oeuvre.

 

Her selected text—Our prices are insane!—speaks to Kruger’s intuitive understanding of the emotional tenor of advertising, and news media sensationalism. The use of hyperbole and the exclamation mark communicate a sense of frenetic urgency, related to the churn of the American economy in the late 1980s, as innovations in computer technology and expanded globalization at the end of the Cold War had a positive impact on the stock market. The 1980s, too, marked the beginning of investors’ more explicit understanding of art as a valuable investment and commodity item.

 

Kruger’s text registers the economic boom of the late 1980s, and the artist’s own ambivalent place within capitalism, as a successful artist whose work commanded high prices. However, Kruger is not alone in the art market, and her signature use of direct address involves the viewer in the artwork’s statement; these aren’t just her prices, they are our prices.

 

Untitled (Our prices are insane!) belongs to the wider artistic output of the Pictures Generation, a loosely affiliated group of artists, including Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman, among others, whose work directly engaged the role of television, film, advertising, and news media on the popular American consciousness. Untitled (Our prices are insane!), with its almost hysterical advertising copy, relates to Holzer’s decoupling of text and context. In Kruger’s work, as in Holzer’s, a line of text, removed from its original context, creates new meaning—in the present work, the phrase Our prices are insane!, overlaid on a horror film still, provokes emotional resonances beyond any ad-man’s flash-sale focus. With Untitled (Our prices are insane!), Kruger asks a larger question about the role of language in contemporary society, which resonates to our present, social media age. In an over-saturation of text and image, how can either mode have meaning?

 

 

ⁱ Barbara Kruger, “Artist Bio,” The Broad, accessed Oct. 2023, online.